


codependent

by rizcriz



Series: tumblr is dying time to get compiling [31]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Another Timeline, Childhood Friends, M/M, big sad, major character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 15:05:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16956249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rizcriz/pseuds/rizcriz
Summary: Jane and henry realize the bond between Quentin, Eliot and Margo is the strongest, so they go back to their formative years and try to make it stronger.





	codependent

Jane and Henry realize three of their group of idiots are somewhat intrinsically linked. So much so that they hatch a plan. It’s dangerous, and so much more than either of them have ever planned—but going back twenty three years and rearranging their lives — while a hassle, isn’t so much so that they can’t do it.

And, honestly, Jane loves a challenge (that doesn’t risk her life).

Eliot’s family dies in a fire, shortly after his first birthday.  She doubts they’ll be missed—especially the crude man with the yellow teeth and ghastly personality. And Eliot’s moved to upstate New York. Margo’s family abandons her in an alley when Henry casts a quick forgetting spell on them, and erase her from their memory. If Jane’s being honest, she’s seen enough of them in these loops that it doesn’t make much of a difference, whether or not they’re their for Margo. She’s practically raised herself every time before, and every time after, Jane suspects, if this loop fails.

And, Quentin.

Quentin is the center of it all.

Jane watches Margo find her place in the foster system. Forces the two toddlers into the same room, and watches as they gravitate towards each other just as they have in every time loop before.

Then she plants herself in Ted Coldwater’s life, just before Quentin’s born, and casts a spell of wanting, needing, so strong that no mere mortal can resist. And then all she has to do is … point him and his wife in the direction of the one (two) things that will fill that aching want.

Two little kids, sad, and perfect, sitting alone (but together, always together) at the center of the nursery in the foster center.

And she waves them off as they’re taking to their new homes.

They watch from then on, but never interfere, hoping beyond hope that it’s enough for the trio of them to be strong enough to defeat the Beast when the time comes.

*

Of course, Margo and Eliot are hesitant for the first few years. Margo goes out of her way to make Quentin feel unwanted, because Eliot is hers, hers, hers! But, Quentin is all smiles and hair, and Eliot’s always a sucker for hair he can braid. So when Margo takes her naps those first few years, Eliot sits with his legs crossed, Quentin sprawled out in front of him, head resting in Eliot’s lap. He braids his hair, until Quentin’s blinking up at him, sleepy eyed and smiley. And then they switch, and Quentin attempts to wrangle the curls atop Eliot’s head—though it’s never to quite the avail as Eliot’s.

At age eight, Quentin makes them all friendship bracelets. Eliot’s is bright blue, Margo’s a soft orange. He doesn’t make himself one, but not two days later, Eliot comes back and gives him a soft yellow bracelet. Neither he nor Margo admit that Margo made it. And Quentin doesn’t mention that Eliot can’t craft to save his life.

When they turn ten, Margo gets into her first fight at school. She punches another student who calls Quentin a baby. It’s the first time, later beneath the play structure with contraband candy bars, that she tells Quentin she loves him almost as much as she loves Eliot.

Quentin crushes his candy bar into the sand in his rush to wrap his arms around her in a hug. And Eliot just sits next to them, smugly eating his butterfinger, like he’s known all along that they’d love each other.

When they turn fourteen and Eliot gets his first crush, Quentin doesn’t talk to him for a month. Margo just rolls her eyes, and humors both of them with crappy movies, and books that she pretends she hates. Eventually it all comes to a head, when Eliot corners Quentin in their shared bathroom, and demands to know why he’s avoiding him.

Their bond breaks almost in half that night when Quentin shoves him aside tearfully and rushes towards his own room. Not in half, not actually. Not for them. Not ever.

It’s two weeks later when Margo’s able to get the reason out of him, when she locks him in her room, flips her hair over her shoulder and asks him when he’s going to tell Eliot he’s in love with him—like they aren’t his adoptive siblings, and it’s not the weirdest thing to happen to any of them ever. When Quentin bursts into tears, she pulls him into a hug so tight he can’t breathe, and then tells him that he has nothing to be ashamed of.

In two, completely unrelated events–a few months after Margo gets her first kiss, Quentin has his first breakdown.

Eliot and Margo are able to get through to Quentin in a way that Ted can’t. They’re the ones who finally convince him to get help, when they find him crying on the bathroom floor. And they go with him, each with one of his arms in theirs, as they walk him to his first therapy session. Margo holds his hand when he gets his first prescription, and they lay with him in bed while he adjusts to the medication.

The first time he tries to kill himself, they yell at him. Then they stop yelling, and they lie with him again. Margo grips his arm so tight he fingertips create little crescent moon imprints in his arm, and she tells him she’ll always be there. Even when they’re fighting. Even if the world explodes, he’d better be alive for her to blame it all on him.

It gets the first laugh out of him in weeks.

On Quentin’s sixteenth birthday, Margo takes him out for ice cream and then abandons him at the local park without so much as a, “You’re walking home, birthday boy.”

Five minutes later, Eliot appears.

And not even a minute after that, Quentin gets his first kiss.

It’s awkward after, when they have to tell their parents. But they’re disturbingly cool with it, and neither of them kick Eliot out.

Not long after that, Margo pulls them aside, and in a disturbing, and rare, display of emotion, tearfully tells them they aren’t allowed to abandon her, and she seems close to tears before Quentin and Eliot pull her into a hug and tell her she couldn’t get rid of them if she tried.

Which rings true, when they all turn eighteen and decide to go to the same college.

And, again, when only weeks after they graduate, they’re vanished off the New York streets and appear on the blooming, beautiful Brakebills campus – together. They take the test–Quentin and Eliot pretend not to cheat off Margo–and when they’re admitted, Margo and Eliot wait outside the deans office, and comfort Quentin when they find out he’s expected to stop taking his medication.

And they never leave each others side — not until they die.

It’s when they die that Jane and Henry realize giving them so much time together–creating that bond between them doesn’t make them stronger. Because they have no source of pain, other than their mother, and the mysterious disappearances of their families. They have nothing that makes them powerful enough to defeat the beast. They don’t form friendships with the others.

They grow so dependent on one another, that when one falls, the other two walk willingly into the beasts waiting spell, because an afterlife together is all they can bear.

Its then that Jane realizes, as she stares at bracelets made of string covered in blood, that no matter what happens when they do meet–that until that point, they need to suffer as much as possible, otherwise they’ll never be strong enough to defeat the beast, so long as they have each other.

 


End file.
